What is bFree?
• bFree is a tool for viewing, searching, and extracting Blackboard course content.
• A course is extracted and presented as an outline that reflects the actual organization of the course.
• bFree is a desktop application that operates on Blackboard archive (and export) zip files.
• bFree is free of charge and can be freely distributed.
Why should I use bFree?
• To convert your Blackboard course into a standalone web site.
• To share course materials with colleagues who do not have access to Blackboard.
• To have your course in a standard, portable format.
• To move your course materials from Blackboard to another online environment.

More details here: University of North Carolina

ALISON is a free online learning resource for basic and essential workplace skills. ALISON provides high-quality, engaging, interactive multimedia courseware for certification and standards-based learning. All courses on ALISON are accessible for free to individual learners.
This is a high quality collection of resources including learning objects in these areas:

Digital Literacy & IT Skills
Enterprise & Business Skills
Financial & Economic Literacy
Health & Safety & Compliance
Health Literacy
Leadership & Management Training
Language Skills
Personal Development & Soft Skills
Teacher Training (Coming Soon)

Worth a visit, register for free.

A free online resource which creates MP3 files from your text documents. Post the content, and it will be converted to audio and emailed back to you.

You get a choice of voices, reading speeds etc. and some of them even sound quite human. Very functional for a freebie.

The list is compiled from the contributions of 155 learning professionals (from both education and workplace learning) who shared their Top 10 Tools for Learning both for their own personal learning/ productivity and for creating learning solutions for others.

Available as a list on the web, or as a downloadable PDF file.

This piece of software looks interesting for the creation of multimedia items. You can incorporate video, audio, office components, documentation, scripts and just about anything that you can view in a browser.

Could be very useful for creating VLE content, and at £45 a year it looks like a snip.

A very healthy update, with links to various tools, toolkits, resources, articles and accessibility tools.

Click on the image to go to the update.

 The college has access to the Atomic Learning site, which is a great tool for short video tutorials for teaching or CPD.

“Atomic Learning provides web-based software training and curriculum resources for more than 110 applications learners and educators use every day. Our just-in-time approach focuses on answering the common questions people have when learning popular software packages.

Atomic Learning provides thousands of short, easy-to-understand tutorial movies and a library of curriculum resources that can be used as an integral part of a professional development programme, a valuable curriculum supplement, and an anytime/anywhere software training resource.”

Have a look at the ‘Getting Started’ guide here.

For get login details for Atomic Learning, contact library or LTC staff. library@perth.uhi.ac.uk

donald.maclean@perth.uhi.ac.uk

Zotero is a freely available browser extension for Firefox that allows users to collect, manage and cite their research sources.

It integrates tightly with online resources and helps users locate and save the full reference information for the source. While it has too many features to list here, it also allows the storage of PDFs, files, images, links and whole web pages.

It works with Firefox, but not IE7.

JISCMail  is a great way to keep up to date with developments in tertiary education. You can subscribe to mailing lists by academic subject, or sign up for information about library and information services or pedagogical issues.

It is advisable when signing up to specify how you want information to be sent to you. You can usually choose to visit the mailing list yourself, or get sent a weekly update. Daily updates or real time updates are not to be recommended, as they can get a bit busy.

Alan Scott (Creative Industries, Goodlyburn) has started using Amazon Listmania to list books he recommends for student use, and also highlighting those that are available in Perth College Library.
Which is a seriously good idea!
You can visit Alan’s list spot on Amazon here.

Students can check the availability of titles in the library on the Millennium catalogue, and they can access their own records and renew books once they’ve borrowed them.